Friday, October 3, 2008

"I was disturbed to read in Thursday's Irish Times yet another factually inaccurate opinion piece from one of the small band of eco-loonies. The idea that the climate is "paying the price" for low-cost flying is as absurd as it is untrue.

In an article littered with false claims and environmental mumbo-jumbo, readers are invited to share the writer's delusion that massive increases in taxation (on air travel) will somehow "save" our planet, as if it needs saving in the first place. Wrong, wrong and wrong again."

"No industry has improved its technology usage or reduced its emissions per customer as much as the airline industry in the past decade. For example Ryanair, by switching from older, polluting aircraft to quieter, fuel-efficient 737-800s, has reduced its emissions per passenger-kilometre by 50 per cent over the past 10 years"

"The biggest lie at the heart of all of this eco-babble is that higher taxes will somehow save the planet. This is simply untrue. Higher taxes simply means greater government revenue, waste and misspending."

"Unlike these eco-clowns, the airline industry is doing everything in its power to reduce its impact on the environment."

"Irish citizens and visitors are now going to be penalised by the mindless bureaucrats of Brussels, encouraged by these eco-loonies, whose predictions about global warming are the modern-day equivalent of those doom-mongers in the middle ages who used to run around towns and cities preaching that the end of mankind was nigh! It wasn't, and nor will the world's climate pay a price for low-cost flights."

"Anyone who goes around and says that carbon dioxide is responsible for most of the warming of the 20th century hasn't look at the basic numbers."Patrick Michaels - Ph.D. Ecological Climatology, Professor of Environmental Sciences, U. of Virginia

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”Phil Jones, Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia, to Steve McIntyre